Who has benefited from CrossFit?

Many professional and elite athletes are participating in the CrossFit Program. Prize-fighters, cyclists, surfers, skiers, tennis players, triathletes and others competing at the highest levels are using the CrossFit approach to advance their core strength and conditioning, but that’s not all. CrossFit has tested its methods on the sedentary, overweight, pathological, and elderly and found that these special populations met the same success as our stable of athletes. We call this “bracketing”. If our program works for Olympic Skiers and overweight, sedentary homemakers then it will work for you. (CrossFit Training Guide 2006)

Who is CrossFit For?An Excellent explanation by Gregg Glassman

Rising popularity of CrossFit within military and law enforcement circles has led to sufficient institutional and group adoption of our program to draw important lessons on the differences between traditional military PT and CrossFit PT. Some of the differences were wholly expected others were less expected but no less significant.

One glaring advantage with the adoption of CrossFit PT is improved fitness – dramatically improved fitness, but what is singularly unique about our program is the manner in which the improved fitness has been demonstrated. CrossFit PT has been measured against other PT programs by testing its adherent’s performance against the testing standards of the program it replaced! At first this may not seem significant but testing of traditional PT trained athletes against CrossFit-like demands produces more DNF’s on test day than above average performances.

Constantly varied programming built from functional exercises executed at high intensity is the key to CrossFit’s physiological advantage. Our distillation of load, range of motion, exercise, power, work, line of action, flexibility, speed, and all pertinent metabolics to a single value – usually time, has conferred other less expected benefits as well.

With CrossFit PT every workout provides a useful data point. We collect relative and absolute performance measures every single workout. Measurement is important and no PT program we know of offers as many opportunities for metrics as CrossFit. The information that can be mined from an individual’s, team’s, or company’s performance is incredible, invaluable, and generally not available with traditional PT.

One surprising result of the deliberate and public performance ranking for each workout has been the motivation and acceleration of improvement of those less physically capable by temperament, training, or natural limitation. Ranking has seemingly done more for bottom performers than top performers.

Our reliance on functional movements, including many presumed too complex or technical for mass application, has returned skill to PT. Over the past 60 years traditional PT has been flensed of nearly all skill elements that train for coordination, accuracy, agility, and balance. The costs here are enormous and extend to losses in speed and power as well producing an athlete generally less capable of dealing with variances and vagaries of opponents, movement, and terrain.

Our use of functional movements has also reduced the chronic overuse injuries that plague traditional PT program participants. Injuries to the back and knees, shin splints, and other “sick day” maladies have been greatly reduced with implementation of CrossFit.

Finally, the intensity of our workouts was designed with the sole objective of maximizing adaptation. One critical side benefit has been a dramatic reduction in PT training time while greatly improving the payout. (Gregg Glassman CF Journal Dec 1st 2004)

World-Class Fitness in 100 Words

Eat meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch and no sugar. Keep intake to levels that will support exercise but not body fat. Practice and train major lifts: Deadlift, clean, squat, presses, C&J, and snatch. Similarly, master the basics of gymnastics: pull-ups, dips, rope climb, push-ups, sit-ups, presses to handstand, pirouettes, flips, splits, and holds. Bike, run, swim, row, etc, hard and fast. Five or six days per week mix these elements in as many combinations and patterns as creativity will allow. Routine is the enemy. Keep workouts short and intense. Regularly learn and play new sports.~Greg Glassman

Is this for me?

Absolutely! Your needs and the Olympic athletes differ by degree not kind. Increased power, strength, cardiovascular and respiratory endurance, flexibility, stamina, coordination, agility, balance, and coordination are each important to the world’s best athletes and to our grandparents. The amazing truth is that the very same methods that elicit optimal response in the Olympic or professional athlete will optimize the same response in the elderly.

Of course, we can’t load your grandmother with the same squatting weight that we’d assign an Olympic skier, but they both need to squat. In fact, squatting is essential to maintaining functional independence and improving fitness. Squatting is just one example of a movement that is universally valuable and essential yet rarely taught to any but the most advanced of athletes. This is a tragedy.

Through painstakingly thorough coaching and incremental load assignment CrossFit has been able to teach anyone who can care for themselves to perform safely and with maximum efficacy the same movements typically utilized by professional coaches in elite and certainly exclusive environments.